"Empowering students to make critically informed, purposeful choices about their writing."

I believe in empowering students to make critically informed, purposeful decisions about their writing and its ability to affect increasingly high stakes conversations in their communities, disciplines, and careers. More than a trite slogan or catch-phrase, this belief forms the core of my teaching practices. I strive to create a lively classroom environment that motivates students to learn by fostering attitudes of self-efficacy and informed experimentation. As such, my courses emphasize a composition process that actively incorporates student backgrounds, interests, and choices into their work, and where failure and critical reflection are an integral part of the learning process. Through collaborative multi-step projects, service-learning components, and public dissemination of their work, students learn to critically and creatively negotiate their responses to the constraints of real world contexts and audience expectations.

Empowering students means more than delivering positive feedback or periodic pep talks, which is not to say that those strategies aren’t useful or necessary. To me, student empowerment begins by setting environmental conditions which foster attitudes of self-efficacy and informed risk-taking. Too often, students taking required composition courses enter the classroom plagued by a number of negative dispositions, which ultimately inhibit their learning and writing: anxiety over their perceived lack of writing ability, doubt about the course’s relevance to their professional development, suspicion of the subjective values and assessment policies of Humanities instructors, and cynicism regarding the institution’s general education requirements (just to name a few). Without robust environmental systems to counter these dispositions (or to foster positive ones), the classroom can quickly become a place of drudgery and frustration; one where students are at odds with their instructor and resistant to learning. Ideally, those systems work specifically to highlight student goals and interests, encourage processes of inquiry and collaborative problem solving, and treat failure as a requisite step toward critical self-reflection, further experimentation, and authentic learning experiences.

In practice, my teaching strategies and assignments are designed to incorporate student input and interests. At the most basic level, this means surveying student majors and soliciting their specific goals for the course as well as for their careers. Hence, my class plans are always titled as “tentative” since I constantly tailor readings, discussions, and class activities to fit their goals and areas of interest. On a more complex level with higher stakes, I ask students to develop the rubrics by which I will assess their writing. Through sustained inquiry and dialogue, students articulate a series of assessment criteria and define the parameters they use to judge effective writing. In every case, my students are shocked to find that the rubrics they create feature criteria that fulfill or go beyond the course learning objectives. My teaching also emphasizes a composition process that is driven by inquiry and experimentation. This process first asks students to generate sets of guiding questions based on their own disciplinary or personal interests and to conduct relevant research. Here, I encourage students to pursue multiple, sometimes divergent, directions, and to “remix” perspectives, materials, methods, and ideas from a variety of print and digital sources. Students experiment with various composing strategies and media technologies to persuasively articulate, organize, and deliver their work creatively. These pieces are then consistently workshopped among peer groups in order to solicit multiple instances of feedback and develop effective revision strategies. In each case, workshops ask peer reviewers to assess how others' work effectively responds to an authentic composing situation in ways that impact real audiences.

Therefore, my course assignments rely heavily on service-learning components, peer collaboration,and online communities. Rather than assign formulaic essays with abstract audiences and contrived contexts, I utilize multi-stage projects situated within real world contexts. Students taking “Community and Writing” partner with local non-profits, serving and collaborating with the organization's community for the entire semester. The sustained research project for this course asks students to analyze, define, and address a community issue in concert with their fellow class members and organization partners. Not only do they compose a scholarly white paper, but students must also somehow translate the paper into a different media genre as well as an appropriate plan of action that appeals specifically to their community partners. In “Basic Writing,” I ask students to collaboratively summarize and respond to issues raised in various Composition articles. Groups are each assigned a different article and begin by drafting and revising traditional summary/response papers through a series of writing workshops. The next stage guides groups through creating media artifacts which translate and present their responses to an audience of their peers. In addition to crafting interesting and informative multimedia objects, these artifacts are also subjected to the classroom community’s critical eye. Finally, student groups must collect and respond to their peers’ criticisms with appropriate revisions. All of this is perhaps facilitated best through the technology and media incorporated into my classroom. Thus, I also spend a considerable amount of class time facilitating my students' familiarity with a variety of technologies. Not only will they be expected to demonstrate fluency and professionalism with digital products, processes, and environments upon entering the job market, but I also help students develop a critical awareness about the writing (and ethos) they already craft online in order to make more effective composing decisions in the future. Thus, most of my classes utilize wikis that grant students full “read and write” privileges. These wikis offer a simple, user-friendly environment for delivering course material, soliciting and referencing student responses, and for publicly publishing their work. I also ask students to use Google apps for collecting and recording their research, collaborative composing, and reviewing each other’s' work. More recently, I have asked students to share their research and writing on Facebook and in various other public forums in order to elicit a broader range of feedback and start public discussions about local issues. I make it a point to emphasize how every member of our course community has equal freedom to revise, comment on, and publish course content on whichever medium we use. As a result, I’ve found that students are much more confident about engaging in conversations about their work. Further, they are prompted to seriously consider audiences outside of our class when others such as Facebook friends, family members, or message board commentators respond to and critique their ideas.

In every case, regardless of the particular project, mediating technology or audience, students are expected to explain and reflect upon the efficacy of their choices throughout the entire composition process. In my classes, students must constantly negotiate (through inquiry and reflection) between the constraints of the project, their own ideas, and audience expectations. In addition, I systematically build multiple opportunities for justification and reflection into my courses: mini-conferences during class activities, required one-on-one conferencing outside of class, reflection letters, formal written responses to peer feedback, and various informal reports. Each of these strategies is designed to prompt explicit thinking and talking about their writing choices in relation to purposely ill-defined problems, complex contexts, and a multiplicity of possible “solutions.” I have found that this systematic emphasis on inquiry and reflection fosters greater situational awareness, methodological pattern recognition, and the ability to transfer composition strategies from one context to another. Thus, I consider a student to be successful when she is able to clearly articulate specific project goals and then systematically explain how her choices and strategies help to accomplish those goals. Of course, this is no simple task: there is no one “right” answer and the route from inventive questions to effective delivery winds and doubles back more often than students at first expect. Initially, they usually resist this process, preferring linear instructions to guide them lockstep through a task. Sadly, a few never stop resisting and so leave my courses frustrated and still wondering why they are forced to take multiple composition courses. Most usually comment that my courses not only require serious work, but are conceptually difficult. I heartily agree with these comments and frequently employ the positive feedback and pep-talks referenced at the outset of this philosophy. However, I can also say without hesitation that those comments are invariably followed by an equal amount of affirmative statements which express an appreciation for my enthusiastic support of student ideas as well as reflect the sense of value and positive learning experiences I intend for students to take away from my courses.

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